U.S. and Russia Plan Conference Aimed at Ending Syrian War

Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov in the garden of the Foreign Ministry in Moscow on Tuesday. They agreed to peace talks on Syria after a day of meetings.Credit
Mladen Antonov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MOSCOW — Russia and the United States announced on Tuesday that they would seek to convene an international conference within weeks aimed at ending the civil war in Syria, jointly intensifying their diplomatic pressure on the combatants to peacefully settle a conflict that has taken more than 70,000 lives and left millions displaced and desperate.

Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, announced their agreement to arrange the conference after a day of intense diplomatic meetings here. Mr. Kerry, who was visiting Russia seeking to find common ground on the Syria conflict, told reporters at a joint appearance with Mr. Lavrov in Moscow that the aim would be to push the government of President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian opposition to attend.

The announcement appeared to signal a strong desire by both countries to halt what has been a dangerous escalation in the conflict, with evidence of chemical weapons use, a surge in the number of civilians fleeing combat and a refugee crisis that is overwhelming Syria’s neighbors. Israeli aerial attacks this past weekend on suspected munitions sites in Syria heightened and further complicated the tensions in the region.

Mr. Kerry’s visit also came as the Obama administration faced increasing calls to intervene in the conflict with lethal military aid to the insurgency or perhaps stronger action like the enforcement of a no-fly zone over Syria to protect rebel-held areas. The effort to seek a negotiated solution with the Russians suggested that the administration wanted to first make a public push toward diplomacy.

President Obama defended his cautious approach earlier in the day in Washington, telling reporters he was going to make decisions based on the facts and not “on a hope and a prayer.” Mr. Obama, who has said the use of chemical weapons in Syria would cross a “red line,” reiterated his view that the evidence of such use was still insufficient to require action or enable him to unite American allies behind a response.

Mr. Kerry said both Russia and the United States wanted to hold the peace conference “as soon as practical, possibly, hopefully as soon as the end of this month.”

The United States supports the insurgency that has been seeking to depose Mr. Assad, while Russia has been his most important foreign patron. But as the two-year-old struggle in Syria has worsened, the Russian government has signaled that it is not necessarily bound to Mr. Assad’s political survival as part of a solution.

“I would like to emphasize we do not, we are not interested in the fate of certain persons,” Mr. Lavrov told reporters on Tuesday. “We are interested in the fate of the total Syrian people.”

It was unclear how Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov would persuade the antagonists to put aside their hostilities for talks, and there was no word on where they would be held — or even any assurance that they would take place.

But the diplomatic effort was unusual, given the sometimes rancorous relationship between the United States and Russia, and seemed to be the one optimistic spot on what was otherwise another bleak day in the Syria conflict.

“The alternative is that there is even more violence,” Mr. Kerry told reporters. “The alternative is that Syria heads closer to the abyss, if not over the abyss and into chaos.”

Both men spoke as Syria lost Internet access in what appeared to be a deliberate shutdown by the Syrian government, with networks there going offline at about 11 p.m. Syria time. Telephone access also appeared to be blocked. The government has intentionally disrupted the Internet in the past to foil rebel communications when the military was undertaking major operations.

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Internet monitoring companies said traffic into Syria came to a dead stop, reflecting what they called an intentional effort to block any information from entering the country. “It’s akin to someone removing all the street signs into Syria,” said Matthew Prince, the founder of Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based Internet security firm that monitors large volumes of Internet traffic.

In Geneva, United Nations relief agency officials said the number of displaced Syrians inside the country had more than doubled in the past two months, to 4.25 million, and that roughly one in three Syrians, or about 6.8 million, needed urgent assistance — half of them children. More than 1.4 million Syrians are now refugees in neighboring countries.

Earlier Tuesday, four United Nations soldiers patrolling part of the disputed Golan Heights area between Syria and Israel were detained by Syrian insurgents, the second time in two months that members of the blue-helmeted international peacekeeping force in that region have become entangled in Syria’s civil war.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned the detentions and called for the immediate release of the peacekeepers. A spokesman for Mr. Ban, Martin Nesirky, told reporters at the United Nations that all parties must respect the peacekeeping force’s “freedom of movement and safety and security.”

A Syrian insurgent group that calls itself the Martyrs of Yarmouk, responsible for the previous abduction of United Nations peacekeepers in the Golan region, asserted that it had taken custody of the four soldiers for their own safety and posted a photograph of them on Facebook. All are Filipinos and did not appear to have been harmed.

Josephine Guerrero, a spokeswoman for the United Nations departments that oversee its global peacekeeping operations, said efforts were under way to secure the peacekeepers’ release.

The Martyrs of Yarmouk detained 21 Filipino members of the Golan peacekeeping force on March 6. That group was freed after four days, after negotiations and international calls for their release.

The Filipino soldiers are a component of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, the peacekeeping unit responsible for patrolling the Golan Heights buffer zone region between Israel and Syria, established in 1974 after a war in which Israel seized part of the strategic area from Syria. Both countries remain in a technical state of war.

The latest abduction came against a backdrop of sharply heightened tensions between Syria and Israel in recent days. Mr. Assad has accused the Israelis of aerial assaults on military targets near the Syrian capital, Damascus, and threatened reprisals.

Israel has not publicly claimed responsibility for those assaults, but Israeli officials have said they will hit targets in Syria that they believe contain armaments destined for Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militant group that is Mr. Assad’s ally.

The Israelis have strengthened their military deployment in the Golan Heights area recently, reflecting growing concern by Israel that the civil war in Syria could spill over the disputed border. The Israelis have reported at least 30 instances of errant munitions from Syria landing in the Golan, with at least five prompting Israel to fire back.

Steven Lee Myers reported from Moscow, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Hania Mourtada and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon; Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations; Nicole Perlroth from San Francisco; and Mark Landler from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on May 8, 2013, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. and Russia Plan Conference Aimed at Ending Syrian War. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe